However, in the blue corner representing smaller, craft brewers, the Brewers Association (BA) is not impressed. An alternative act, the Small BREW Act, which reached the Senate last week, seeks cuts only for smaller scale producers.

But it is a tangled web, as Jason Notte explains, writing on The Street website. For one, Brooklyn Brewery is among those supporting the BEER Act. Meanwhile, he suggests that the levels proposed in the Act would imply that Boston Beer Company is not a craft brewer, which is part of the reason the BA changed its defintion two years ago.